May 29th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

The history of aviation is full of feats — transatlantic this, non-stop that — that sound like extravagant publicity stunts but foreshadow innovations with real-world impact. With any luck, the same will be true for the Solar Impulse, a planned aircraft whose development is profiled today in the European Wall Street Journal.

The hyper-attenuated plane, which hasn’t been built yet, will run completely on solar power. Unimpressed? It’ll also fly at night, and its designer believes that in a few years he’ll be able to fly for days at a time — touching down, one presumes, only when the pilot can no longer bear being away from terra firma.

The Solar Impulse is the brainchild of Bertrand Piccard, member of a self-described “dynasty of explorers and scientists who conquered the heights and the depths of our planet.” The Journal puts it in more prosaic but still impressive terms: Piccard’s grandfather was the first person to balloon to the stratosphere; his dad was the first to plumb the ocean’s deepest trenches in a bathyscaphe. Bertrand himself beat Richard Branson in the race to travel non-stop around the globe in a hot-air balloon.

Piccard hopes his stunt will do for solar-powered transport what his family didn’t do for ballooning and bathyscaphing: While he doesn’t expect us to be flying Virgin Solar in the near future, he hopes a feat like this will spur the development of the kinds of tech — more efficient solar cells and batteries, stronger lightweight materials, and so on — that will be essential for any entrepreneur hoping to make solar power part of a real-world vehicle, airborne or not, that can be used by the non-pioneering masses.

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